THE crisis gripping Gordon Brown's corrupt, incompetent regime now looks terminal. Against the backdrop of deepening recession, Labour politicians have almost given up trying to run the country. Instead they devote their time to plotting and infighting. Functioning government has been replaced by institutionalised anarchy as the mood of rebellion spreads through Labour's ranks. In an almost unprecedented move, the Communities Secretary Hazel Blears has openly attacked Gordon Brown's premiership, describing his political campaigning as "a lamentable failure".
Other senior Labour figures have joined the chorus of disapproval. Former home Secretary Charles Clarke has said he is "ashamed to be a Labour MP" and has demanded the sacking of Brown's closest political ally, the Children's Secretary Ed Balls.
'A man of towering rages and sly deceit'
Westminster is rife with talk of leadership challenges and mass defections. "This is the first time in my life I have seen my colleagues united. They are united in despair," says the Labour backbencher Bob Marshall-Andrews.
There is a sense of poetic justice about the anger directed at Brown, for he has now become the victim of the treacherous methods he practised against others. The Prime Minister can make no convincing appeal to loyalty since his rise to the top of the Labour party was built on serial disloyalty. Brown has surrounded himself with thuggish henchmen throughout his career in Parliament: men such as Ed Balls, his former spin doctor Damian McBride and his trade union bully boy Charlie Whelan, all of them eager to do his dirty work. Smearing internal opponents, fomenting divisions and conducting vendettas have been the hallmarks
of Brown's approach.
Throughout the past year he has viciously undermined his Chancellor Alistair Darling, while he ensured last September that lurid details about the private life of health Minister Ivan Lewis were made public: Lewis having committed the crime of daring to question some of Brown's policies. This is the real character of the figure who now sits in number 10, brooding on the collapse in his authority.
I always felt that he would turn out to be a disaster because I had seen him at close quarters when I worked for the Labour front bench at Westminster throughout the early nineties. Then he struck me as rude, immature, neurotic, and vengeful, a man of towering rages and sly deceit, completely lacking in integrity or any sense of perspective. There was an air of intimidation and crudeness about him, as his rumpled, sweating bulk charged bullishly along the corridors of Westminster, his fawning, foul-mouthed yes-men at his sides.
The darkest predictions of Brown's premiership have been realised. In just 20 months he has disgraced the highest office, ruined our economy and made himself an international laughing stock. Everything he has done, from the abolition of the 10p tax rate to his bizarre attempt to give MPs a daily attendance allowance, has been dictated by short-term tactics rather than a desire to meet the real needs of the country.
He has emerged as a figure of spectacular dishonesty, whether it be lying about "British jobs for British workers" in the face of his continued support for mass immigration or in his endless manipulation of economic statistics. So as Brown's leadership crumbles, there are now three scenarios facing Labour MPs.
- First, they can limp on to the general election next year with Brown at the helm, in which case they will probably face a crushing electoral defeat.
- Second, they can organise an effective leadership challenge. But this is unlikely, not least because they have proved so gutless in the past.
Brown's own cowardice is matched by the members of his Parliamentary party, who surrendered to his bullying in 2007 when he wanted to avoid a leadership contest after ousting Blair and again failed to mount a coup against him last summer after the fiasco of the Crewe by-election.
Moreover, there is no obvious successor to Brown. None of the names regularly touted as alternatives, such as Alan Johnson, David Miliband or Harriet Harman, has much appeal to the public.
- The third alternative is that Brown resigns. This might sound implausible given that Brown plotted for so long against Blair, yet he is also a man of monumental egotism. There is only so much humiliation he can take. Already there are reports emerging from Downing Street that he "hates" the job of Prime Minister and is at the end of his tether, reflected in his regular temper tantrums.
Tea mugs, even printers, have been thrown from his desk in fits of volcanic frustration. A man with a pathological fear of the democratic process will not relish a massive election defeat next year.
The first was the Liberal peer Lord Rosebery, who in 1895 suffered such chronic insomnia that he had to be injected with heavy doses of morphine to help him sleep. The second was the Tory Anthony Eden, who wandered through the Suez crisis of 1956 in a haze of amphetamines and barbiturates.
Wounded, paranoid and infuriated, Brown now seems dangerously close to losing his grasp of reality as he staggers from one political catastrophe to another. his departure, however achieved, cannot come soon enough for the country.
Gordon Brown was under growing pressure to hold an independent inquiry into Britains complicity in torture last night after ministers admitted that terror suspects detained by British soldiers in Iraq were secretly flown by the US to Afghanistan. 
Tony Blair is ready to announce that he will step down next year, probably around his 10th anniversary in Downing Street in May. Senior Blairite MPs said that high-level discussions were going on to prepare for a transition to an expected Gordon Brown premiership. If Mr Blair announced a timetable at or shortly before Labour's annual conference at the end of September it would defuse the growing restlessness in the party over the succession. Mr Blair could use the conference to acclaim his record while paving the way for a new leader to take on the challenge of the rejuvenated Conservative Party led by David Cameron.